Wildflowers' Perfume Sweetens a Life Devoted to Nature

By ANDI RIERDEN

Published: June 9, 1991

"I'VE always been what you might call a primitive," said Mary Pasco Sherwood, reaching for a peanut butter cookie. "I never wanted a pile of money. Just a place in the woods where I could listen to the birds and smell the wildflowers."

Ms. Sherwood, 85 years old, was enjoying late-morning tea at her two-room house in Storrs. Sketches of flowers, a wall map tracing Central American Indian tribes and a bookcase lined with nature classics highlighted an otherwise Spartan setting.

She has always preferred few material embellishments, said Ms. Sherwood, whose steel-blue eyes contrasted with soft wisps of white hair. And in a society propelled by consumerism, that makes her something of an anomaly, she said. Festival at UConn

Known among naturalists throughout New England as the first lady of wildflowers, or Wildflower Mary, Ms. Sherwood said she has spent the greater part of 60 years working to preserve the region's native plants and raise public awareness about their importance.

Six years ago, while working as a volunteer at the Connecticut State Natural History Museum, she scouted the woods early one morning and collected nearly 100 species of wildflowers, took them back to the museum and created a public display. The exhibit grew into the Annual Wildflower Festival, which last year attracted 1,200 visitors, museum officials said.

This year's festival will run from 1 to 5 P.M. today in the Jorgensen Auditorium on the University of Connecticut campus in Storrs and will include speakers as well as displays of the state's wildflowers. Ms. Sherwood said she planned to help collect the flowers early this morning and to be on hand to answer questions.

"Wildflowers in a closed room create a heavenly perfume that's just delicious," said Ms. Sherwood. "But when you dig them up, you always return to replant them. You never, never pick wildflowers, or you'll lose the seeds."

She said this while she hunted for the sneakers that she was going to wear for a hike in the Albert E. Moss Forest, a wildflower and wildlife sanctuary a mile from her home. Ms. Sherwood was one of a handful of people who persuaded the university's trustees to turn the 157-acre forest into a sanctuary in 1990.

As a forestry student at UConn during the 1930's, Ms. Sherwood helped Dr. Moss, one of her professors, plant a stand of white pines on the land. The trees are now 80 feet tall. She graduated in 1934, becoming the first woman forester in the country. She received her master's degree in wildlife management from Cornell University in 1937.

After easing her blue van into a parking spot near the sanctuary, Ms. Sherwood gathered a pot of bloodroot and a trowel and made her way into the forest. She spends several days a week there, planting and taking care of the wildflowers, she said, standing amid a patch of skunk cabbage. Kneeling under a yellow birch tree, she began digging a small hole.

"You know how long it took nature to make soil like this?" she asked, clutching a clump of humus in her palm. "About 1,000 years. And it takes a bulldozer about half an hour to destroy it all."

Bloodroot in place, she ran up a hill and hopped over a brook. While walking along a trail that skirts the sanctuary's pond, Ms. Sherwood identified dozens of wildflowers, like bluets, her favorite, and pink lady-slippers, anemones, cinquefoils, May apples and jack-in-the-pulpits.

"Aren't they the frosting on the landscape," she said. "And ideal soil holders, too." Along a marsh, she pointed out the golden blooms of cow slip and a spread of sphagnum moss, which the Indians used for sponges, she said.

A few strides later, she stroked the sinewy bark of a blue birch tree. "Reminds me of a man's arm muscles," she said. She noted black-and-white oak trees and estimated that they were around 150 years old. She also identified trees like black locust, American beech and white ash. 'Wildlowers Seemed to Fit'

A camper and kayaker for more than 40 years, Ms. Sherwood said she grew up reading natural history and fiction by Gene Stratton Porter, author of "The Harvester," the story of a man who lived alone in the woods and loved wildflowers.

"I had dreamed about starting a tree farm, but wildflowers seemed to fit into everything," she said. "I love roaming the woods for them and studying how they were affected by soil, light and moisture."

Her career as a forester has been varied and sporadic, she said, partly because of the reluctance of state forestry officials in the 1930's and 40's to hire a woman, and partly because she has always considered herself something of a sojourner.

Ms. Sherwood landed her first job in the field during World War II, working for the State of Wisconsin, she said. But when the war ended and the men returned home, officials asked her to serve as a liaison between the state and several women's nature clubs.

"These were all beauty parlor women with painted fingernails who couldn't relate to someone with dirt under her nails from digging in the soil," she said. "It wasn't long before I realized that it wasn't for me."